Linux User Groups (LUG) and Canadian elected officials are responding to the news that the Canadian online census forms block free software users from participating. Last week's story helped uncover the fact that the software used for the online census seems to violate several government policies and treaties.

"Some of Canada's best known musicians, including Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlin, Sum 41, and Barenaked Ladies, have formed a new copyright coalition. The artists say in a press release that they oppose file sharing lawsuits, the use of DRM, and DMCA-style legislation and that they want record labels to stop claiming that they represent their views."

Sésamath association proposes a textbook of mathematics for the class of 5th pennies free, free downloadable licence on Internet and which will be sold in May 2006 pennies format paper approximately ten euros in partnership with the Génération5 editor.

Well it's fiscal year end again, and we're all doing the mad dance to spend the last of our budget so we don't get axed next year (what a stupid system, but that's not the topic for today). How do you go about "purchasing" an open source product?

I'll give a particular example: we've been using pdfcreator to solve a thorny issue for a number of months now. It's an open source success story: a free program works better (for our use case) than the ones we paid several thousand dollars for. Three cheers for us, and for the taxpayer. Now how do we spread that benefit to the developers who created the fine program (well, collection of programs) that allows us to do so much with so little?

Groklaw's John Macdonald attended the Hamilton Linux User Group's special session on the SCO v. IBM litigation last night, which featured Peter Salus, Robert Young and Ren Bucholz as speakers. John was kind enough to send us a report, and the best news is that there will be a video and audio feed eventually. Peter told me a little about the event too. He says about 30% of the audience said they'd heard about the event from Groklaw. John says at least a quarter from where he was sitting, so a number of you went. If anyone has more details, feel free to let us know in your comments.

Free and open source software (FOSS) is not a major issue in the Canadian election scheduled for January 23. None of the major political parties -- the Liberals, Conservatives, New Democratic Party (NDP), or Bloc Québécois -- has taken a position on FOSS. The up and coming Green Party is rumored to be announcing a FOSS platform shortly, but even that may be only be token support, considering that the Green Party Web site includes downloads of current policy in Microsoft Word format. The only candidate for a major party who is openly advocating FOSS is Mathieu Allard, the young NDP candidate for the Francophone riding of Saint Boniface in Manitoba. Recently, I talked to him about his advocacy and the role that FOSS plays in his campaign.

It may be excluded from Monday night’s national leadership debates, but the Green Party of Canada is about to release a more detailed platform that will reiterate its support for open source software adoption in the public sector.

The party will include its stance on open source software in a section called “technology and culture” that will be among several mini-platforms it will publish within the next two weeks, a spokesman said. In its platform for the 2004 election, the Green Party set itself apart by promising that, if elected, it would require federal agencies to initiate transitions to open source operating systems and productivity software. It also said it would make technology that has been developed at public expense a publicly owned resource.

With Sony slated to appear in a New York courtroom on Friday to seek approval for its class action settlement for the rootkit fiasco, its Canadian arm is now facing several Canadian class action suits. The Merchant Law Firm, based in Calgary, launched class action suits in both the Ontario and B.C. courts yesterday (Ontario brief, B.C. brief). This follows a less-publicized class action launched in Quebec against Sony last November. All of these cases arise from the rootkit issue. The briefs make for interesting reading as the Canadian cases raise a long list of legal issues including the violation of Canadian privacy law, breach of contract, violation of the Competition Act, and a host of tort claims.